hat she was seeking at the minute was someone
who agreed with her. As she went back upstairs, she met Eileen on her
way to the front door. Eileen paused and deliberately studied Linda's
face, and Linda stopped and waited quietly until she chose to speak.

"I presume," said Eileen at last, "that you and Katy would call the
process through which you are going right now, 'taking the bit in your
teeth,' or some poetic thing like that, but I can't see that you are
getting much out of it. I don't hear the old laugh or the clatter of
gay feet as I did before all this war of dissatisfaction broke out. This
minute if you haven't either cried, or wanted to, I miss my guess."

"You win," said Linda. "I have not cried, because I make it a rule never
to resort to tears when I can help it; so what you see now is unshed
tears in my heart. They in no way relate to what you so aptly term my
'war of dissatisfaction'; they are for Marian. She has lost again, this
time the Nicholson and Snow prize in architecture."

"Serves her right," said Eileen, laughing contemptuously. "The
ridiculous idea of her trying to compete in a man's age-old occupation!
As if she ever could learn enough about joists and beams and girders and
installing water and gas and electricity to build a house. She should
have had the sense to know she couldn't do it."

"But," said Linda quietly, "Marian wasn't proposing to be a contractor,
she only wants to be an architect. And the man who beat her is Peter
Morrison's architect, Henry Anderson, and he won by such a narrow margin
that her plans were thrown out of second and third place, because they
were so very similar to his. Doesn't that strike you as curious?"

"That is more than curious," said Eileen slowly. "That is a very strange
coincidence. They couldn't have had anything from each other, because
they only met at dinner, before all of us, and Marian went away the next
morning; it does seem queer." Then she added with a flash of generosity
and justice, "It looks pretty good for Marian, at that. If she came so
near winning that she lost second and third because she was too near
first to make any practical difference, I must be wrong and she must be
right."

"You are wrong," said Linda tersely, "if you think Marian cannot
make wonderful plans for houses. But going back to what my 'war of
dissatisfaction' is doing to me, it's a pale affair compared with what
it is doing to you, Eileen. You look a debilitated silh